The Dark Labyrinth (6 page)

When John walked out of the house, after carefully leaving the name of his hotel (so that Alice could go round and apologize), Coréze was full of sympathy and sadness. He had been flattering Alice a good deal, and had even bought a couple of her line-drawings to hang on his walls. He had prophesied great things for her. It was only natural that what had begun as a flirtation of minds should now go a step forward—at least so thought Coréze. Alice was not unwilling to bring John to heel, and what could be simpler than to pretend that she was falling in love with Coréze? As a matter of fact she was not quite sure at this stage what she felt about anything. Coréze was charming, so considerate and gentle. He took her in his arms as she was doing a pencil sketch of him and said: “Don't let me fall in love with you, please don't let me. It hurts too much.” There were tears in his eyes. It was rather exciting and not a little touching. “I have been so hurt by love,” murmured Coréze, getting his hand under her skirt, “it can't happen again, it mustn't.” His passion was very convincing. “Say you won't make me,” he almost shouted and covered her mouth with his own before she could promise that she wouldn't.

She wrote a note to John and asked for a final interview. Rather alarmed by this he hurried back to the villa from the terrace of the hotel. He was received in a dramatic and steely fashion. She had, she said, a confession to make. She was going to leave him for Coréze. He could not help finding her touching and pathetic as she made this confession; people (an irrational part of his mind kept interjecting) are products of their experience. Alice was now behaving rather like Lilian Gish in—what was the name of the film? For a moment John was tempted to say something extremely forcible to Coréze, but the latter had removed himself to Barcelona for a few days to be out of reach. He had a long experience of Latin husbands and did not propose to find himself once more scuffling in the fireplace over a girl he did not really want. He had excused his departure in a short heartbroken note on the grounds that he could no longer stand Alice's presence unless she crowned his flame.

John Baird was really too lazy to get angry. He took a plane for Paris and left Alice fuming. Characteristically, the only reproach he had offered her had been of a social rather than a personal nature—for he was more outraged in his social vanity than in his feelings. “People”, he said, “simply do not behave like this. We are not Bohemians, after all.” It was this that made Alice wonder whether she really could love him or not. If only he had shown violent jealousy and determination—who knows? She might out of pity have renounced Coréze. But no, he treated her with the haughty disapproval of guardian for the erring ward. His worst reproach was, after all, to be a case of English sulks. S'blood!

John left and Coréze returned. As a matter of fact he had only retired to the house of a friend in the suburbs to pass a Jewish feast in self-examination and purification, leaving this little affair, so to speak, on the hob. Alice's letter took a week to be forwarded on from the address in Barcelona. It gave them both time to review the situation.

Alice found in the meantime that she was not going to have a baby after all; but things had progressed so far with Coréze that she did not feel able to draw back at this stage. Besides, Coréze was always teasing her about her youth and inexperience, and this would only give him more ammunition. He would consider her naive and irresponsible. She felt more than ever that she should show herself fully emancipated, and yet.… But John had carried off all their travellers' cheques by mistake, and there was no way of evading a decision. After all, there
was
the faintest hope in the world that she was going to enjoy it all.

She did not. Coréze made love to her with an art and industry which would have to be described to be fully appreciated. Her pride, her self-respect went out of the window in the short space of forty-eight hours. In the same length of time she succeeded in borrowing the price of a plane-ticket to Paris from the Consul. How bitterly she regretted the whole business. So that was what Lawrence meant with his filthy old gamekeeper with his shirt-ends tied round his neck. She would never, she felt, be much of a success as a wife again, and as the aircraft nosed over the Pyrenees she clasped her cold hands together, thinking darkly of broken faith and nunneries.

To John, sitting innocently on the
terrasse
of the Rotonde it seemed that some pronounced attitude of mind was called for on his part—but precisely what? How did one react to the debauching of one's wife by some unchristian foreigner? Here again he found himself, in an obscure way, more angry because the act had offended against the laws of hospitality rather than because his personal love was deeply wounded. He discovered with a shock that he himself had disposed with sex as a problem some long time since. Its only relation to himself now seemed as a subject for conversation with lady novelists. Perhaps this was because he had achieved a certain amount of “intellectual detachment”—as he was pleased to call it. Coréze's behaviour, he thought firmly, was unpardonable in a host. Things like that were not done in England. Or were they?

The little pile of white saucers rapidly grew on the table before him. Should he attempt a gesture of some sort—drink himself to death or ring up Chloe?

Drinks only gave him indigestion or made him sleepy. Besides, his love for Alice was so deeply and comfortably based in habit and interest, that he found it hard to bring to the surface for such boring and idiotic interrogations. He would sulk, and probably grow a moustache. Up to now Alice had always refused to let him grow one because it made his chin look so weak and undershot. He would stop at nothing now.

He looked forward to a mutual retreat and regrouping; something like a month's holiday. But an unrepenting and violent Alice appeared suddenly at the hotel, thirsting for drama.

It took all his forbearance to avoid a serious engagement during the first quarter of an hour. Alice piled reproaches upon him for being a bad husband, for taking all the travellers' cheques with him, and for being too cowardly even to reproach her for what she had done.

To her distracted mind it seemed unbelievable that John should be standing there in front of her exhibiting the merest pique and disapproval; in her own eyes the crime had been enlarging itself until it seemed now to be worth a more distinct response. But no. There he stood, in the middle of this drama, refusing to be drawn in beyond the gentlemanly limits laid down in Kipling's “If”. That he should be able to sit in front of a pile of saucers, dressed in his pork pie hat, blue diceboard tie, canary-coloured cardigan and grey slacks, seemed to be almost irreverent. She noticed that he even fingered an incipient moustache once or twice in a furtive manner.

They continued to sleep in the same bed, though here again John's caution prevented her from enjoying the scenes of which she fell so much need. He did not even try to make love to her. She had planned a dramatic scene about that. “Don't touch me,” she had decided to say in a strangled voice, “can't you see what i've been through?''

Worse, however, was in store for them. Alice discovered that she
was
going to have a baby after all. There was every indication that it would be Coréze's. The thought gave them both a fright. Even John sat up a bit. As for her, she was filled with violent self-loathing for the trick which her body had played upon her. Meanwhile, John conquered his aristocratic disgust sufficiently to carry his inexperience into the consulting-rooms of shabby gynaecologists in the Boulevard Raspail. An operation was arranged and a very cowed Alice thought desperately that poison was really better than dishonour—but submitted herself to science in the person of Dr. Magnoun, a jolly little twig of a Frenchman with an Academy rosette in his button-hole and moustache-ends waxed into a guardee stiffness. “Vous connaissez, Madame,” he said with a certain roguishness, placing her ankles in the canvas hooks hanging from the ceiling and pulling until she was practically standing on her head. “Vous connaissez lépigramme du grand génie Pascal qui dit: ‘Le coeur a des raisons que la raison ne connait pas'?”

Alice returned to a little studio overlooking Parc Montsouris which John had taken. She felt old and worn, and full of a sense of dismal insufficiency. Her anger was changed to gratitude for John's patience and kindness. He looked after her with complete devotion and did not utter a single reproach. If he had she might have rallied more quickly. As it was she spent over a month in bed. This incident effectively disrupted their lives. Their circle of Paris friends seemed to be no longer as “amusing” and as “vital” as heretofore. Alice gave up painting entirely and could not raise enough interest to visit picture galleries to criticize the work of her contemporaries. As for John, the very concerts at the Salle Pleyel became something between a mockery and a bore—so deep a gulf, it seemed, stretched between life and art.

It was at this time, when the frustrating sense of unresolved conflict was making him unhappy, that he ran into Campion again. The latter was making a name for himself. He lived in a little studio behind Alésia and was painting with his customary facility.

Campion at this time was already an expatriate of several years' standing who had found that the life of Paris, which in those days seemed miraculously to exist only for and through the artist, was more congenial to his temper than the fogs and rigours of London. Baird was having a cognac at the Dome when he saw the small self-possessed figure approach from among the tables with the curious swiftness and stealth that always reminded him of a cat. He had seen Campion about quite often in Paris, had visited his exhibitions, and had even bought one of his nudes for Alice. They had never spoken to one another and he was surprised now to see that Campion was smiling in recognition. Baird wondered whether he was perhaps out to cadge a meal as he watched the small figure in the soiled blue shirt and grey trousers. He half-rose to greet him.

Campion was a little drunk and his eyes sparkled. As it was he had just come from a party and was looking for a victim upon whom to fasten and pour out all the dammed-up feelings of persecution and envy which the society of English people seemed to foster in him. “Baird,” he said, with a smile, “a very long time since we met.”

They sat down and ordered drinks, and Baird found not only that Campion remembered him perfectly, but he had even read two small articles he had written in which his work was mentioned favourably. It was not this, however, that was his business, for Campion almost immediately plunged into a description of his party to ease those pent-up feelings within him. Baird at once recognized behind the acid and brilliant sketches he drew of other people the familiar motive: the sense of social inferiority which had made so many artists difficult companions for him. He remembered one horrible occasion when D. H. Lawrence, upset by some imagined slight, refused to talk to him except in an outlandish Derbyshire dialect—which was intended to emphasize his peasant upbringing. Something of the same discomfort possessed him now as he heard Campion talk, and reflected that he had been born probably in Camberwell, and had left a Secondary school at sixteen. His accent sounded suspiciously correct. It was probably the result of studying the B.B.C. announcers.

Campion had been patronized by a gentleman and he was reacting to it now. His description of Lady Sholter barking like a shotgun and dropping her monocle to shake hands with him, was a masterpiece of ferocious miming. “The English, my God, the English,” he said, pleased to have found an audience that did not contest his opinions. “The granite-bound idiocy and moral superiority. The planetary atmosphere of self-satisfaction each of them carries around, to look at himself through. It is staggering.” He moved his toes in his sandals as he talked with exquisite pleasure. He was enjoying himself. “The sense of ritual they had evolved to cover their disastrous negation—their impotence.”

Baird listened carefully and politely, observing his man with interest. Campion's small round face gleamed golden in the light of the street-lamps. His white, well-kept hands moved as he talked in a series of small graphic gestures as if they were drawing very lightly in the air the scenes he was describing.

Campion was doubly annoyed, because, in going to this party, he had broken a self-imposed rule. He had thought perhaps that this time it might be different—but no. Ferocious, and full of a suffocating sense of self-limitation, he had left it after a quarter of an hour. “To be patronized, to be permitted entry because of my talent rather than because of myself—that's what angers me.”

Baird asked why he had gone. Campion gave a mirthless bark of a laugh. “I was told by old Mrs. Dubois that Lady Sholter was anxious to meet me, not only because she thought I was a significant artist, but because she wanted to commission someone to design her a studio for her castle. Idiot that I am, I went partly out of flattery and partly because I cannot afford to turn down two hundred pounds at my time of life.” He drank deeply and ordered another drink. “Not a bit of it,” he said. “She took one look at my clothes and said: ‘Oh, but there's some mistake. You can't be Archie Worm's friend can you? Were you at Eton with Archie?' Madame Dubois whispered ‘Lord Worms' in my ear in an ecstatic voice. Was I at Eton with him? Well, my dear Baird, it turned out that I had been mistaken for Campion the
couturier.
”

Baird protested that this might have happened to anyone, but Campion would not hear of it. Only the English, it seemed, could be boorish or ignorant. “It's because they despise art in England,” said Campion. “The artist is expected to be a sort of potboy or bagman.” He laughed again. “Architectural drawings for Lady Sholter! English architecture, like the English character, is founded on the Draught. You should have seen them. What a fool I am!”